A couple of weeks ago, appreciative of her awesomeness and mentorship (Millennials love mentors), Avi Kaplan wrote a note of appreciation about Stacey Monk:

I want to introduce and thank Stacey Monk who has been a real inspiration and mentor to me.

Stacey runs an organization called Epic Change that seeks to support community change by helping people to use the power of their stories to obtain the resources they need to improve their communities. In its first project, Epic Change is partnering with Mama Lucy Kamptoni expand Shepherds Junior a school in Arusha, Tanzania that now has over 200 students.

By the time Monk saw the post of gratitude for herself, she had been having her own ideas about digital expressions of thanks. Impressed with the community she had seen come together on Twitter, one she built around her nonprofit Epic Change, and in-part motivated by Kaplan's thanks, she hoped to use the Thanksgiving holiday to leverage community members to put money where their their thanks were.

Monk contacted Kaplan and between the two of them (and a bit of help from their community), they built a simple website, installed a ChipIn widget, got on Twitter, and put out a "Tweetsgiving" challenge. The challenge, which quickly turned into a meme where everyone within the community told more of their friends tweet by tweet, was to raise $10,000 to rebuild and expand Shepherds Junior, a primary school in Arusha, Tanzania. Kalplan reached out to K-Buzz, which helped with the marketing. Word spread (with over 3,000 mentions of Tweetsgiving hitting Twitter), the community donated, and in 48 hours, Monk, Kaplan, and Epic Change blew their goals out of the water.

I asked Monk what her community of fellow-Twitter users looks like - how one amasses such masses for support - and she said that she didn't get [Twitter] at first. She kept adding people with like interests in the nonprofit space, or folks tweeting about Africa. Finally, she began following people she was generally and genuinely interested in and she found that the connections were much like those of "a cocktail party I could invite anyone in the world to." Further, Twitter is a gathering place for people who are bound to blog about the conversation happening there. Essentially, people on Twitter are going to talk about their tweets, and the tweets they read, somewhere else. I suggested that it's like the diner or bar that reporters meet at and exchange tips and stories. It was upon this network, her collective of interesting (and interested folks), and of course the network of Kaplan's, that this idea caught fire and successfully raised well over their goal.

Read More:  

• Avi Kaplan's thank you to Tweetsgiving donors.
• Still looking to give/get involved?   Get involved with Epic Change.